Labour Policies : The Conservative Risk Policy

According to the Labour Party website the Labour Party will try to achieve the following if they retain power at the 2010 general election on May 6th:

The Tories offer Britain the wrong kind of change – change that would put the recovery and people’s prosperity at risk. This is a change that Britain cannot afford.

At a time when Britain’s economic recovery is at a critical stage, the public needs more than the shallow rhetoric offered by the Conservatives. Their reckless commitment to immediate cuts would pull the rug from under the recovery. They have no credible plan for dealing with the deficit. Every time their policies come under scrutiny, they wobble. They would put frontline services that millions rely on at risk, by refusing to protect frontline schools, frontline policing and children’s centres from cuts.

Behind the airbrushed posters is a party that still favour the few not the many: cutting Child Tax Credits and Child Trust Funds for ordinary families, while sticking to a tax giveaway of £200,000 to the wealthiest 3,000 estates in the country.

Since David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party his focus has been on changing his party’s image. Through high profile PR stunts he has attempted to demonstrate this change to the electorate. However, many of these attempts have backfired – whether it is airbrushing the Conservative Party’s first campaign poster of 2010, travelling to the North Pole to talk about climate change or being photographed cycling to work with his shoes in a car behind him, David Cameron has proved his talk of change is more style than substance.

David Cameron seems to think that the new image of the Conservative Party means it is easy to get away with the same old Tory policies. You couldn’t get a cigarette paper between the Tory manifesto today and the manifestos that were put forward in 1997, 2001 and 2005. Unfair marriage tax breaks – back from the days of William Hague. Bringing back fox hunting – returning again even though the vast majority of the British people oppose it. Politicising the police with new “police commissioners”, a Michael Howard policy that David Cameron hasn’t even bothered to rename.

Indeed in some areas, the Conservatives are now trying to get away with plans that are more rightwing than they ever proposed before. David Cameron’s inheritance tax cut is more regressive than anything planned by any Conservative leader for twenty years. Even the arch-Eurosceptic William Hague baulked at allying himself with David Cameron’s controversial new partners in the European Union. Even Michael Howard did not propose that new “free market” schools would be allowed to ignore the national curriculum and set up in converted office blocks or temporary buildings. Cuts to Child Tax Credit and Child Trust Funds for families on modest and middle incomes are a Cameron innovation that no previous Tory leader dared pledge.

There is a clear choice at this election. A vote for the Conservatives is a vote for same old Tory party of the past – a party that would put the recovery at risk, threaten public services and would make life tougher for families across the country. They are a change that Britain just can’t afford.

Let us start by making the comparison between Sir Fred Goodwin and Gordon Brown. Both men were responsible for bringing their respective organisations to the brink of economic collapse by imprudent over investment.

Would we really vote for keeping Goodwin on as Chief Executive of RBS on the basis that he had the experience? Considering the uproar over his enormous payoff for failure, I think not. However, in Brown’s case he has been promoted with barely a whimper from the very same people who complained about banker’s bonuses on the basis of his experience.

Firing an entrenched incumbent requires guts. If Labour is not capable of doing this, do you really think they will have the courage to make the much harder decisions required to get us out of the current economic mess.

Unfortunately, unlike most other professions, politicians do not appear to improve with experience, in fact quite the opposite.

The Labour message is actually true. The safest way to take the economy forward is continuation of the current policies. But we’ve got to say something to try to get some votes, so we’ll happil promise give aways that can’t be paid for, and we’ll gloss over the fact that material public sector cuts means loss of 1 million jobs which will trigger less spending and the loss of even more jobs. But we can’t just say we’ll do the same as the current or nobody would vote for us.

Gordon Brown, come on? he was Chancellor in 1997 and stated no more boom and bust, just boom with the economy, now 10yrs on (2007) Brown in charge, jobs down the pan, no money in the piggy bank after the tories had saved at least some, have given back the subsidy that Thatcher got for the uk to Europe, NO REFERENDUM, Bailing out the banks, Job tax to come,troops under equipped and dying for it and a possible 250-300,000 public service jobs to go and to top it , was not even voted as PM democratically.

Initially, I was going to vote for Conservative. However, thinking on the great scheme of things, I have to agree with Labour’s NI increase and 50% tax rate for over 150K earner and to use that money to reduce our deficit, otherwise we’ll end up like Greece – Public Pay Freeze, Tax Increase, Job cuts.